Sociology in the 21st century: between fragmentation and integration

The article is analyzing current sociology in the context of fragmentation and integration periods in the discipline history. The first integrative wave in the history of sociology was in the 1920s– 1950s. It appeared in grand theories by P.Sorokin, T.Parsons, the Frankfurt school which united heterogeneous ideas from classics in models of society as system. After the paradigm crisis of the 1960s– 1970s and following spread of postmodernist discourse, the second integrative wave arose in form of theories overcoming gaps between concepts of determinist structures and constructivist agency (J.Habermas, A.Giddens, P.Bourdieu) as well as in form of metatheorizing (G.Ritzer, P.Sztompka, J.Alexander). Today’s fragmentation of sociology under conditions of metaparadigm crisis and post-globalization is provoked by the rising postcolonial discourse, by attempts to stigmatize western classics and to create theoretical alternatives to the ‘global North’ domination in knowledge production as well as by spread of conceptions opposing social reality of networks and flows to classical sociality of structures and agency (M.Castells, B.Latour, J.Urry, K.Knorr Cetina). The third integrative wave is expected to come in the 2020s displacing tendencies of disintegration, discrimination, growing gaps and rising barriers. Now theories are relevant as they create a coherent configuration of four types of structures: institutions, interactions, networks, and flows. The new subject matter for theorizing is constituted by their interconnections in forms of fields of structurations, scapes of assemblages, communications, platforms, projects, and events. A metaphor of augmented reality is integrating different concepts of social reality and it is overcoming constitutive distinctions in the last century sociology: between system and lifeworld, locality and globality, the private and public, the material and symbolic, the real and virtual, the physical and digital, etc.